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Theme Changer

 Topic: Occupy Wall Street protests

 (Read 27003 times)
  • Previous page 1 2 34 5 ... 7 Next page « Previous thread | Next thread »
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #60 - September 28, 2011, 12:07 AM

    yes.
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #61 - September 28, 2011, 12:11 AM

    no.


    Though economic and political theory are far more your forte than mine, I would be interested in hearing why the institution of private banking is necessary for civilization to function.

    At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
    Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
    Downward to darkness, on extended wings. - Stevens
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #62 - September 28, 2011, 12:28 AM

    Sure. I'm in class right now, but ill write up something

    So once again I'm left with the classic Irish man's dilemma, do I eat the potato or do I let it ferment so I can drink it later?
    My political philosophy below
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwGat4i8pJI&feature=g-vrec
    Just kidding, here are some true heros
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBTgvK6LQqA
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #63 - September 28, 2011, 03:24 AM

    RawStory

    Cornel West at ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest: The elite will tremble

    Public intellectual and Princeton professor Cornel West appeared at the “Occupy Wall Street” protest on Tuesday, the eleventh straight day of the demonstration.

    He gave a speech during the General Assembly in Liberty Park applauding the “sweet spirit in this place” and denouncing “the greed of Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who squeeze the democratic juices out of this country.”

    “I am so blessed to be here,” West said. “You got me spiritually break-dancing on the way here. Because when you bring folk together, of all colors, of all cultures, of all genders, of all sexual orientations the elite will tremble in their boots. And we will send a message that this is the U.S. Autumn, responding to the Arab Spring.”

    “Don’t be scared to say revolution,” he added.

    Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31XN8zgXlI
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #64 - September 28, 2011, 03:45 AM

    Love me some Cornel West 001_wub

    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #65 - September 28, 2011, 03:47 AM

     yes
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #66 - September 28, 2011, 04:00 AM

    Met him in an airport in Philly once. We were waiting on the same flight. Flying coach like a good socialist.  Wink

    I remember watching him as a kid in the William F. Buckley Firing Line debates on PBS-- was always impressed by him (even when I was a little right-wing shit Tongue)

    fuck you
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #67 - September 28, 2011, 04:17 AM

    You were a rightist? Grin I can't even imagine that.
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #68 - September 28, 2011, 04:22 AM

    I was just gonna say the same thing. But I can see it... there are certain tactics of the right-wing that leftist-liberal-progressives overall could stand to learn, understand and adopt.

    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #69 - September 28, 2011, 04:34 AM

    You were a rightist? Grin I can't even imagine that.


    From around 14 to 18 or so, from hard right conservative to far right fascist back to hard right conservative, then veered in-between orthodox libertarian and straight-up nihilist from 19 to 21, didn't swing back to the left until I was 21. Let's put it this way-- I didn't start off as a "good" skinhead. Tongue

    fuck you
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #70 - September 28, 2011, 04:42 AM

    And what were you before 14?
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #71 - September 28, 2011, 04:46 AM

    Left-wing, like my grandpa, who was the biggest influence on me along with my ma. Like him veered from left liberal Democrat to open communist sympathizer. Smiley

    fuck you
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #72 - September 28, 2011, 05:20 AM

    Nice.

    I wasn't too involved in politics before I was 17, but I've been an anti-monarchist with social liberal leanings for as long as I can remember. I turned to communism after studying the Russian Revolution in school. yes
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #73 - September 28, 2011, 05:52 AM

    Finally some good coverage from the mainstream media.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZCysXJqNYg
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #74 - September 28, 2011, 06:07 AM

    Good for MSNBC Afro


    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #75 - September 28, 2011, 06:13 AM







    More #OccupyWallStreet artwork by this Dan Bellini.

    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #76 - September 28, 2011, 06:13 AM




    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #77 - September 28, 2011, 06:14 AM


    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #78 - September 28, 2011, 06:17 AM


    Brilliant! dance
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #79 - September 29, 2011, 04:04 PM

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccazpyz0RyQ
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #80 - September 29, 2011, 11:23 PM

    Well how about that, Q, my predictions have already come true. Tongue

    Quote
    Unions Head to Wall Street

    Citing common cause, the Transport Workers Union - one of the country's largest unions with over 200,000 members - has announced its support for the Occupy Wall Street protests. They plan to join a Friday rally; other unions are following suit.

    The Village Voice interviewed Transport Workers Union Local 100's spokesman Jim Gannon:

    Why did they join? "Well, actually, the protesters, it's pretty courageous what they're doing," he said, "and it's brought a new public focus in a different way to what we've been saying along. While Wall Street and the banks and the corporations are the ones that caused the mess that's flowed down into the states and cities, it seems there's no shared sacrifice. It's the workers having to sacrifice while the wealthy get away scot-free. It's kind of a natural alliance with the young people and the students -- they're voicing our message, why not join them? On many levels, our workers feel an affinity with the kids. They just seem to be hanging out there getting the crap beaten out of them, and maybe union support will help them out a little bit."

    CommonDreams.org
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #81 - September 30, 2011, 12:02 AM

    Nice

    So once again I'm left with the classic Irish man's dilemma, do I eat the potato or do I let it ferment so I can drink it later?
    My political philosophy below
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwGat4i8pJI&feature=g-vrec
    Just kidding, here are some true heros
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBTgvK6LQqA
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #82 - September 30, 2011, 12:06 AM

    This should be interesting. Smiley

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #83 - September 30, 2011, 01:08 AM

    Tempted to go to join the Occupy ____ in my city. I still have yet to know what the general plan is though, even after asking the admin. Guess I'll see when/if I get there.

    "I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want."
    Muhammad Ali
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #84 - September 30, 2011, 03:31 AM

    Rest assured, there's no "general plan" yet. The plan will arise democratically, as has been stated in one of the many videos I posted. Right now the only consensus is that corporations are too powerful. The people taking part in the protests range from liberals to social democrats to socialists to anarchists.
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #85 - September 30, 2011, 03:47 AM

    Interesting...

    Guess I've picked a good time to shut myself in my home. Should also probably learn to wield firearms... If its not too late already that is.

    how fuck works without shit??


    Let's Play Chess!

    harakaat, friend, RIP
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #86 - September 30, 2011, 04:33 AM

    Powerful speech.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZLhEOJ8XA
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #87 - September 30, 2011, 04:35 AM

    I love the human microphone thing dance

    "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #88 - September 30, 2011, 04:36 AM

    Me too! yes

    "Mic check." Grin
  • Re: Occupy Wall Street protests
     Reply #89 - September 30, 2011, 09:32 AM

    Michael Moore analysed the problem brilliantly:


    Quote
    We've been force-fed some mighty powerful "drugs" to keep us quiet while we're being mugged by this lawless gang of CEOs. One of these drugs is called fear and the other is called Horatio Alger....

    It is first prescribed to us as children in the form of a fairy tale - but a fairy tale that can actually come true! It is the Horatio Alger myth. Alger was one of the most popular American writers of the late 1800s. His stories featured characters from impoverished backgrounds who, through pluck and determination and hard work, were able to make huge successes of themselves in this land of boundless opportunity. The message was that anyone can make it in America, and make it big.

    We are addicted to this happy rags-to-riches myth in this country. People in other industrialised democracies are content to make a good enough living to pay their bills and raise their families. Few have a cutthroat desire to strike it rich. They live in reality, where there are only going to be a few rich people, and you are not going to be one of them. So get used to it.

    Of course, rich people in those countries are very careful not to upset the balance. Even though there are greedy bastards among them, they do have some limits placed on them. In the manufacturing sector, for example, British CEOs make 24 times as much as their average workers - the widest gap in Europe. German CEOs only make 15 times more than their employees, while Swedish CEOs get 13 times as much. But here in the US, the average CEO makes 411 times the salaries of their blue-collar workers. Wealthy Europeans pay up to 65% in taxes, and they know better than to bitch too loud about it or the people will make them fork over even more.

    In the US, we are afraid to sock it to them. We hate to put our CEOs in prison when they break the law. We are more than happy to cut their taxes even as ours go up! We don't want to do anything that could harm us on that day we end up millionaires. It's so believable because we have seen it come true. In every community there's at least one person prancing around as the rags-to-riches poster child, conveying the not-so-subtle message: "SEE! I MADE IT! YOU CAN, TOO!!"

    It is this seductive myth that led so many millions of working people to become investors in the stock market during the 90s. They saw how rich the rich got in the 80s and thought, "Hey, this could happen to me!"

    The wealthy did everything they could to en courage this attitude. Understand that in 1980 only 20% of Americans owned a share of stock. Wall Street was the rich man's game and it was off-limits to the average Joe and Jane. Near the end of the 1980s, though, the rich were pretty much tapped out with their excess profits and could not figure out how to make the market keep growing. I don't know if it was the brainstorm of one genius at a brokerage firm or the smooth conspiracy of all the well-heeled, but the game became, "Hey, let's convince the middle class to give us their money and we can get even richer!"

    Suddenly, it seemed like everyone I knew jumped on the stock market bandwagon. They let their unions invest all their pension money in stocks. Story after story ran in the media about how everyday working people were going to be able to retire as near-millionaires! It was like a fever that infected everyone. Workers immediately cashed their pay cheques and called their broker to buy more stocks. Their broker!

    There were ups and downs, but mostly ups, lots of ups, and you could hear yourself saying, "My stock's up 120%! My worth has tripled!" You eased the pain of daily living by imagining the retirement villa you would buy some day or the sports car you could buy tomorrow if you wanted to cash out now. No, don't cash out! It's only going to go higher! Stay in for the long haul! Easy Street, here I come!

    But it was a sham. It was all a ruse concocted by the corporate powers-that-be who never had any intention of letting you into their club. They just needed your money to take them to that next level, the one that insulates them from ever having to actually work for a living. They knew the big boom of the 90s couldn't last, so they needed your money to artificially inflate the value of their companies so their stocks would reach such a phantasmal price that, when it was time to cash out, they would be set for life, no matter how bad the economy got.

    And that's what happened. While the average sucker was listening to all the blowhards on CNBC tell him that he should buy even more stock, the ultra-rich were quietly getting out of the market, selling off the stocks of their own company first. In September 2002, Fortune magazine released a staggering list of these corporate crooks who made off like bandits while their company's stock prices had dropped 75% or more between 1999 and 2002.

    At the top of the list of these evildoers was Qwest Communications. At its peak, Qwest shares traded at nearly $40. Three years later the same shares were worth $1. Over that period, Qwest's director, Phil Anschutz, and its former CEO, Joe Nacchio, and the other officers made off with $2.26bn simply by selling out before the price hit rock bottom.

    Meanwhile, the average investor stayed in, listening to all the rotten advice. And the market kept going down, down, down. More than four trillion dollars was lost in the stock market. Another trillion dollars in pension funds and university endowments is now no longer there.

    So, here's my question: after fleecing the American public and destroying the American dream for most working people, how is it that, instead of being drawn and quartered and hung at dawn at the city gates, the rich got a big wet kiss from Congress in the form of a record tax break, and no one says a word? How can that be?

    I think it's because we're still addicted to the Horatio Alger fantasy drug. Despite all the damage and all the evidence to the contrary, the average American still wants to hang on to this belief that maybe, just maybe, he or she (mostly he) just might make it big after all. So don't attack the rich man, because one day that rich man may be me!

    Listen, friends, you have to face the truth: you are never going to be rich. The chance of that happening is about one in a million. Not only are you never going to be rich, but you are going to have to live the rest of your life busting your butt just to pay the cable bill and the music and art classes for your kid at the public school where they used to be free.

    And it is only going to get worse. Forget about a pension, forget about social security, forget about your kids taking care of you when you get old because they are barely going to have the money to take care of themselves.

    If you are still clinging to the belief that not all of Corporate America is that bad, consider this example of what our good captains of industry have been up to of late.

    Are you aware that your company may have taken out a life insurance policy on you? Oh, how nice of them, you say? Yeah, here's how nice it is.

    During the past 20 years, companies including Disney, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, JP Morgan Chase and Wal-Mart have been secretly taking out life insurance policies on their low- and mid-level employees and then naming themselves - the corporation - as the beneficiary! That's right: When you die, the company - not your survivors - gets to cash in. If you die on the job, all the better, as most life-insurance policies are geared to pay out more when someone dies young. And if you live to a ripe old age, even long after you've left the company, the company still gets to collect on your death. And regardless of when you croak, the company is able to borrow against the policy and deduct the interest from its corporate taxes.

    Many of these companies have set up a system for the money to go to pay for executive bonuses, cars, homes or trips to the Caribbean. Your death goes to helping make your boss a very happy man sitting in his Jacuzzi on St Bart's.

    And what does Corporate America privately call this special form of life insurance?

    Dead Peasants Insurance.

     

    Announce a  march on the whitehouse to demand cutting all welfare support for the poor and unemployed and that WILL bring US workers out in their millions.


    The mosque: the most epic display of collective douchbaggery, arrogance and delusion
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